Archive for January, 2009

We were listening to Muse at work and I proposed to my workmate Adam that nothing was too over the top for Muse. Because their songs are always so uncompromisingly epic, any ridiculous scenario that you put the band in seems plausible. Quotes from this conversation include:

“I feel that Matt (vocalist/composer) and the guys from Muse should inhabit a mansion located on the moon”.

Muse would enter their gigs in any of the following ways:

“rickshaws carried by giant robosapiens.”

“Individually, but by various different jet-packs.”

“Horse-Drawn carriage, but instead of horses, the carriage is drawn by beautiful women in faux Victorian outfits riding motorcycles.”

“Out of the Tardis.”

Muse, live in concert.

Nothing is too OTT for Muse, if they could arrive by a single bolt of lightning I would not be at all surprised if they did.

I’ve got a few things to catch up on in reporting about, including my account of Kapcon 18. Recently though, I’ve been thinking about the various scenarios that I’ve written for Kapcons’ past and how I create characters for those scenarios.

When I go about creating a scenario for Kapcon or the SDC, I typically start with a system that I want to run or a genre that’s really got my attention at the time of my inspiration. What follows is a basic arc that I would ideally want the plot to follow; this is usually broken down into 3 or 4 acts.

At this stage, it’s an incredibly rough outline as when I sit down to create the characters, their personalities and histories are integrated into the plot. For the most part my previous games have been pretty superficial, by that I mean the characters and their relationships are built separately to the plot and tend to operate that way in play too.

At the moment I’m writing a scenario where hopefully the characters histories are going to be a little more immersed in the overarching plot, which should hopefully be a bit of a change of pace for me.

What I wanted to discuss though, was the way that I come up with characters for my scenarios. It’s actually rather simple, I tend to steal any character concepts that I’m exposed to at the time of writing and if their basic concept fits, I mold them into the scenario. I won’t take a concept that won’t fit, but if I can find parallels in the world I’m writing in, then stealing the character is fair game. After I steal 3 key concepts for characters, the remaining 2 characters usually full into place as necessary for group dynamics to work, or interesting elements that link the plot to the group. This is assuming I’m writing for a 5 player game (which is my preference :))

For example: Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Supernatural (which I totally love BTW) and totally love the Winchester family. At the same time I was thinking of the characters that would inhabit my Cthuhlutech game, and loved the dynamic of the two brothers, Sam and Dean. So what do I do, I steal the basic concepts and begin to mix them into my scenario with incredibly promising results.

Obviously, a lot of my games have directly taken characters in their entirety (Super Stir fry Samurai, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Pizza Cats are examples), but the above principal applies even for characters that I play in long term games.

What about you? How do you create characters for your scenarios or other forms of writing? I’m interested to know how others approach the creation of a roleplaying scenario, more specifically, how you build characters in?

If you’re reading this, likely you know me or I’ve pointed you in this direction some how. Welcome to my new interweb space, the reasoning behind it being that I wanted somewhere spiffy and new to talk about any creative endeavors I’m currently involved with or anything cool and interesting that I wanted to share.

I will still be keeping up to date on my Live Journal activity, but I like this forum as it’s pretty and will encourage me to talk about anything that I’m currently working on or share reviews on rad music, TV/Movies or games that I’ve come across in my travels.